Modern, high-performance production tools are far from being used to their maximum capacity. This observation becomes all the more significant in such fields as the aeronautical industry, special-purpose machines, small production runs, etc.
Moreover, economic imperatives impose both small stocks of finished products and swift reactions to market forces.
To attain an optimum management of manufacturing time it is necesary to reduce as much as possible both the dead time between two machining operations and the machine setting-up time when changing from machining one type of workpiece to another.
A large part of this time is spent on a "tricky" operation that predetermines all the rest of the manufacturing process; it concerns the setting-up of the workpieces in their machine and their proper fitting therein.